As a boy, Sperry developed a keen interest in machinery and electricity. At the age of 19 he persuaded a Cortland manufacturer to finance him in developing an improved dynamo as well as an arc lamp. The next year (1880) he went to Chicago and opened a factory, the Sperry Electric Company, to make dynamos and arc lamps. He invented the electric rotary and chain undercutting machines, and, to manufacture them, he established the Sperry Electric Mining Machine Company (1888).

Two years later, he turned his attention to transportation. First, he designed an electrical industrial locomotive and motor transmission machinery for streetcars, founding the Sperry Electric Railway Company in Cleveland (later sold to General Electric Company). From 1894 he made electric automobiles powered by his patented storage battery.

After 1900 he established an electrochemical research laboratory with C.P. Townsend at Washington, D.C. There they invented the chlorine detinning process—for salvaging tin from old cans and scrap—and processes for producing white lead from impure lead and caustic soda from salt. Around this time he also founded the Chicago Fuse Wire Company to manufacture electric fuse wire by machines he had invented. In the meantime, he had not forsaken his old interest in lighting; by 1918 he was producing a high-intensity arc searchlight six times brighter than any earlier light.

Sperry’s greatest inventions sprang from what for decades had been a toy—the gyroscope, which, once properly aligned, always points to true north. The German inventor H. Anschütz-Kaempfe developed the first workable gyrocompass in 1908; Sperry’s version was first installed on the U.S. battleship Delaware in 1911. Sperry set up his Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn in 1910. He extended the gyro principle to guidance of torpedoes, to gyropilots for the steering of ships and for stabilizing airplanes, and finally to a ship stabilizer.

The Sperry Corporation (now part of Unisys Corporation) manufactured computers, precision instruments and controls, farm machinery, and electric and hydraulic equipment and was a direct descendant of his gyroscope firm. In his lifetime, Sperry founded eight manufacturing companies and took out more than 400 patents.